The Black Christ, & other poems

Chapter 6: At the Etoile

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About This Book

A debut collection of formally polished poems that moves between intimate lyric and public meditation, exploring love, youth, mortality, faith, and racial identity. The poet employs sonnets and varied forms, classical and Christian imagery, and musical rhythms to examine personal feeling and communal injustice, sometimes elegiac, sometimes celebratory. Several pieces dramatize spiritual questioning and the cost of social servitude, while others reflect on beauty, art, and the paradoxes of pride and poverty. The result is a compact sequence blending technical restraint with vivid metaphor and moral concern.

At the Etoile

(At the Unknown Soldier’s Grave in Paris)

If in the lists of life he bore him well,

Sat gracefully or fell unhorsed in love,

No tongue is dowered now with speech to tell

Since he and death somewhere matched glove with glove.

What proud or humble union gave him birth,

Not reckoning on this immortal bed,

Is one more riddle that the cryptic earth

Though knowing chooses to retain unsaid.

Since he was weak as other men,—or like

Young Galahad as fair in thought as limb,

Each bit of moving dust in France may strike

Its breast in pride, knowing he stands for him.